Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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lobalization is often seen as global Westernization. O n this point, there is substantial agreement among many proponents and opponents. Those who take a n upbeat view of globalization see it as a marvelous contribution of Western civilization to the world. There is a nicely stylized history in which the great developments happened in Europe: First came the Renaissance, then the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, and these led to a massive increase in living standards in the West. And now the great achievements of the West are spreading to the world. In this view, globalization is not only good, it is also a gift from the West to the world. T h e champions of this reading of history tend to feel upset not just because this great benefaction is seen as a curse but also because it is undervalued and castigated by a n ungrateful world. From the opposite perspective, Western dominance-sometimes seen as a continuation of Western imperialism-is the devil of the piece. In this view, contemporary capitalism, driven and led by greedy and grabby Western countries in Europe and North America, has established rules of trade and business relations that do not serve the interests of the poorer people in the world. T h e celebration
Reprinted with permission from Amartya Sen, "How to Judge Globalism: THE AMERICAN PROSPECT, Volume 13, Number 1: January 01,2002.The American Prospect, 11 Beacon Street, Suite 1120, Boston, MA 02108. All rights reserved.
Amartya Sen
of various nonewestern identities-defined by religion (as in Islamic fundamentalism), region (as in the championing of Asian values), or culture (as in the glorification of Confucian ethics)--can add fuel to the fire of confrontation with the West. Is globalization really a new Western curse? It is, in fact, neither new nor necessarily Western; and it is not a curse. Over thousands of years, globalization has contributed to the progress of the world through travel, trade, migration, spread of cultural influences, and dissemination of knowledge and understanding (including that of science and technology). These global interrelations have often been very productive in the advancement of different countries. They have not necessarily taken the form of increased Western influence. Indeed, the active agents of globalization have often been located far from the West. To illustrate, consider the world at the beginning of the last millennium rather than at its end. Around 1000 A.D., global reach of science, technology, and mathematics was changing the nature of the old world, but the dissemination then was, to a great extent, in the opposite direction of what we see today. T h e high technology in the world of 1000 A.D. included paper, the printing press, the crossbow, gunpowder, the iron-chain suspension bridge, the kite, the magnetic compass, the wheelbarrow, and the rotary fan. A millennium ago, these items were used extensively in China-and were practically unknown elsewhere. Globalization spread them across the world, including Europe. A similar movement occurred in the Eastern influence o n Western mathematics. T h e decimal system emerged and became well developed in India between the second and sixth centuries; it was used by Arab mathematicians soon thereafter. These mathematical innovations reached Europe mainly in the last quarter of the tenth century and began having an impact in the early years of the last millennium, playing an important part in the scientific revolution that helped to transform Europe. The agents of globalization are neither European nor exclusively Western, nor are they necessarily linked to Western dominance. Indeed, Europe would have been a lot poorer-economically, culturally, and scientifically-had it resisted the globalization of mathematics, science, and technology at that time. And today, the same principle applies, though in the reverse direction (from West to East). To reject the globalization of science and technology because it represents Western influence and imperialism would not only amount to overlooking global contributions4rawn from many different parts of the world-that lie solidly behind so-called Western science and technology, but would also be quite a daft practical decision, given the extent to which the whole world can benefit from the process.
II
A Global Heritage
In resisting the diagnosis of globalization as a phenomenon of quintessentially Western origin, we have to be suspicious not only of the anti-Western rhetoric but also of the pro-Westem chauvinism in many contemporary writings. Certainly,
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the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution were great achievements-and they occurred mainly in Europe and, later, in America. Yet many of these developments drew o n the experience of the rest of the world, rather than being confined within the boundaries of a discrete Western civilization. Our global civilization is a world heritage-not just a collection of disparate local cultures. When a modern mathematician in Boston invokes an algorithm to solve a difficult computational problem, she may not be aware that she is helping t o commemorate the Arab mathematician Mohammad Ibn Musa-alKhwarizmi, who flourished in the first half of the ninth century. (The word algorithm is derived from the name al-Khwarizmi.) There is a chain of intellectual relations that link Western mathematics and science to a collection of distinctly non-Western practitioners, of whom al-Khwarizmi was one. (The term algebra is derived from the title of his famous book Al-Jabr wa-al-Muqabilah.) Indeed, alKhwarizmi is one of many non-Western contributors whose works influenced the European Renaissance and, later, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. The West must get full credit for the remarkable achievements that occurred in Europe and Europeanized America, but the idea of an immaculate Western conception is an imaginative fantasy. Not only is the progress of global science and technology not an exclusively West-led phenomenon, but there were major global developments in which the West was not even involved. The printing of the world's first book was a marvelously globalized event. The technology of printing was, of course, entirely an achievement of the Chinese. But the content came from elsewhere. T h e first printed book was an Indian Sanskrit treatise, translated into Chinese by a halfTurk. The book, Vajracchedika Prajnaparamitasutra (sometimes referred to as "The Diamond Sutra"), is an old treatise o n Buddhism; it was translated into Chinese from Sanskrit in the fifth century by Kumarajiva, a half-Indian and half-Turkish scholar who lived in a part of eastern Turkistan called Kucha but later migrated t o China. It was printed four centuries later, in 868 A.D. All this involving China, Turkey, and India is globalization, all right, but the West is not even in sight.
Amartya Sen
broader controversy about Western education versus indigenous Indian education. The "Westernizers," such as the redoubtable Thomas Babington Macaulay, saw n o merit whatsoever in Indian tradition. "I have never found one among them [advocates of Indian tradition] who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia," he declared. Partly in retaliation, the advocates of native education resisted Western imports altogether. Both sides, however, accepted too readily the foundational dichotomy between two disparate civilizations. European mathematics, with its use of such concepts as sine, was viewed as a purely "Western" import into India. In fact, the fifth-century Indian mathematician Aryabhata had discussed the concept of sine in his classic work o n astronomy and mathematics in 499 A.D.,calling it by its Sanskrit name, jya-ardha (literally, "half-chord"). This word, first shortened to jya in Sanskrit, eventually became the Arabic jiba and, later, jaib, which means "a cove or a bay." In his history of mathematics, Howard Eves explains that around 1150 A.D., Gherardo of Cremona, in his translations from the Arabic, rendered jaib as the Latin sinus,the corresponding word for a cove or a bay. And this is the source of the modern word sine. The concept had traveled full circle-from India, and then back. To see globalization as merely Western imperialism of ideas and beliefs (as the rhetoric often suggests) would be a serious and costly error, in the same way that any European resistance to Eastern influence would have been at the beginning of the last millennium. Of course, there are issues related to globalization that do connect with imperialism (the history of conquests, colonialism, and alien rule remains relevant today in many ways), and a postcolonial understanding of the world has its merits. But it would be a great mistake to see globalization primarily as a feature of imperialism. It is much bigger-much greater-than that. T h e issue of the distribution of economic gains and losses from globalization remains an entirely separate question, and it must be addressed as a further-and extremely relevant-issue. There is extensive evidence that the global economy has brought prosperity to many different areas of the globe. Pervasive poverty dominated the world a few centuries ago; there were only a few rare pockets of affluence. In overcoming that penury, extensive economic interrelations and modern technology have been and remain influential. What has happened in Europe, America, Japan, and East Asia has important messages for all other regions, and we cannot go very far into understanding the nature of globalization today without first acknowledging the positive fruits of global economic contacts. Indeed, we cannot reverse the economic predicament of the poor across the world by withholding from them the great advantages of contemporary technology, the well-established efficiency of international trade and exchange, and the social as well as economic merits of living in an open society. Rather, the main issue is how to make good use of the remarkable benefits of economic intercourse and technological progress in a way that pays adequate attention to the interests
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of the deprived and the underdog. That is, I would argue, the constructive question that emerges from the so-called antiglobalization movements.
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benefits. One cannot rebut the criticism that a distributional arrangement is unfair simply by noting that all the parties are better off than they would be in the absence of cooperation; the real exercise is the choice between these alternatives.
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By analogy, to argue that a particularly unequal and sexist family arrangement is unfair, one does not have to show that women would have done comparatively better had there been no families at all, but only that the sharing of the benefits is seriously unequal in that particular arrangement. Before the issue of gender justice became an explicitly recognized concern (as it has in recent decades), there were attempts to dismiss the issue of unfair arrangements within the family by suggesting that women did not need to live in families if they found the arrangements so unjust. It was also argued that since women as well as men benefit from living in families, the existing arrangements could not be unfair. But even when it is accepted that both men and women may typically gain from living in a family, the question of distributional fairness remains. Many different family arrangementswhen compared with the absence of any family system-would satisfy the condition of being beneficial to both men and women. The real issue concerns how fairly benefits associated with these respective arrangements are distributed. Likewise, one cannot rebut the charge that the global system is unfair by showing that even the poor gain something from global contacts and are not necessarily made poorer. That answer may or may not be wrong, but the question certainly is. T h e critical issue is not whether the poor are getting marginally poorer or richer. Nor is it whether they are better off than they would be had they excluded themselves from globalized interactions. Again, the real issue is the distribution of globalization's benefits. Indeed, this is why many of the antiglobalization protesters, who seek a better deal for the underdogs of the world economy, are not+ontrary to their own rhetoric and to the views attributed to them by others-really "antiglobalization." It is also why there is no real contradiction in the fact that the so-called antiglobalization protests have become among the most globalized events in the contemporary world. Altering
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However, can those less-well-off groups get a better deal from globalized economic and social relations without dispensing with the market economy itself? They certainly can. The use of the market economy is consistent with many different ownership patterns, resource availabilities, social opportunities, and rules of operation (such as patent laws and antitrust regulations). And depending o n these conditions, the market economy would generate different prices, terms of trade, income distribution, and, more generally, diverse overall outcomes. T h e arrangements for social security and other public interventions can make further modifications to the outcomes of the market processes, and together they can h yield varying levels of inequality and poverty.
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T h e central question is not whether to use the market economy. That shallow question is easy to answer, because it is hard to achieve economic prosperity without making extensive use of the opportunities of exchange and specialization that market relations offer. Even though the operation of a given market economy can be significantly defective, there is no way of dispensing with the institution of markets in general as a powerful engine of economic progress. But this recognition does not end the discussion about globalized market relations. The market economy does not work by itself in global relations-indeed, it cannot operate alone even within a given country. It is not only the case that a market-inclusive system can generate very distinct results depending on various enabling conditions (such as how physical resources are distributed, how human resources are developed, what rules of business relations prevail, what social-security arrangements are in place, and so on). These enabling conditions themselves depend critically o n economic, social, and political institutions that operate nationally and globally. The crucial role of the markets does not make the other institutions insignificant, even in terms of the results that the market economy can produce. As has been amply established in empirical studies, market outcomes are massively influenced by public policies in education, epidemiology, land reform, microcredit facilities, appropriate legal protections, et cetera; and in each of these fields, there is work to be done through public action that can radically alter the outcome of local and global economic relations.
Amartya Sen
nience of the managerial classes and of privileged workers over the removal of widespread illiteracy, medical deprivation, and other adversities of the poor. These possibilities do not, of course, impose any insurmountable barrier to development, but it is important to make sure that the surmountable barriers are actually surmounted.
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the total supply of arms exported in the entire world. The U.S. share alone has just gone up to almost 50 percent of the total sales in the world. Furthermore, as much as 68 percent of the American arms exports went to developing countries. The arms are used with bloody results-and with devastating effects o n the economy, the polity, and the society. In some ways, this is a continuation of the unhelpful role of world powers in the genesis and flowering of political militarism in Africa from the 1960s to the 1980s, when the Cold War was fought over Africa. During these decades, when military overlords-Mobuto Sese Seko or Jonas Savimbi or whoever-busted social and political arrangements (and, ultimately, economic order as well) in Africa, they could rely o n support either from the United States and its allies or from the Soviet Union, depending on their military alliances. The world powers bear an awesome responsibility for helping in the subversion of democracy in Africa and for all the far-reaching negative consequences of that subversion. The pursuit of arms "pushing" gives them a continuing role in the escalation of military conflicts today-in Africa and elsewhere. The U.S. refusal to agree to a joint crackdown even o n illicit sales of small arms (as proposed by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan) illustrates the difficulties involved.